Never thought I'd see this happen

FranklinD

Story from our local paper today. Kind of a surprise to me.

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/business/3746941-steam-plants-new-name-ushers-new-era-duluth

kcopp

That will be costly. If the individual buildings have steam they should install their own boilers and get off the district heating.

Steamhead

The only reason to have a district system was to get rid of all those coal-fired boilers running at partial load and making lots of smoke. It was one of the first environmentally beneficial projects. But we don't burn coal anymore, except in large boilers like theirs.

And where is it written that steam boilers can only burn coal?

And did anyone think about frozen piping if the system goes down for whatever reason?

You can't fix stupid- or corrupt. I bet if you followed the money, you'd find some interesting things..........................

TomS

How about keeping the steam system and pumping back the warm condensate back to the central boiler. This would conserve water and heat.

Mad Dog_2

Amen. Frankie and Tom......Mad dog

FranklinD

Exactly!

There are no savings in this.

The funny thing is that about 2 miles up the bay is a multi-fuel steam plant that also generates electricity. It is now used almost exclusively to run the paper mill in West Duluth. But it can run on natural gas, oil, coal, and I believe a type of modified compressed wood.

A while back when I first read that the Evergreen Group was going to be taking over operations, I googled them and foud many other projects that they had run into the ground, both in a technical sense and financially. I hoped it wouldn't come to this, but here we are. Dumb.